Directing in the Style of Yorgos Lanthimos

The Principle

Yorgos Lanthimos makes films about the rules. Not the explicit rules of law or morality, but the implicit, often absurd rules that govern human behavior — the unspoken agreements about how to speak, how to love, how to grieve, how to submit, and how to dominate. By making these invisible rules visible, by literalizing them into the bizarre regulations of his fictional worlds, Lanthimos exposes the fundamental strangeness of social life. In The Lobster, single people must find a romantic partner within forty-five days or be transformed into an animal. In Dogtooth, parents raise their children in total isolation, teaching them a false language in which "sea" means "armchair" and "zombie" means "a small yellow flower." These premises are absurd, but their absurdity is a lens that magnifies the absurdity already present in the conventions we accept without question.

The Lanthimos method depends on a crucial tonal commitment: absolute seriousness. His characters never wink at the audience. They never signal awareness that their situation is bizarre. They inhabit their distorted worlds with the same earnestness and anxiety that we inhabit our own. This deadpan commitment is what transforms absurdism from comedy into horror — or rather, into a space where comedy and horror become indistinguishable. When a woman in The Lobster matter-of-factly describes how she was transformed into a pony because she failed to find a mate, the delivery is so flat, so devoid of affect, that the audience cannot decide whether to laugh or recoil. This undecidability is the Lanthimos experience.

Beneath the absurdism, Lanthimos is fundamentally concerned with power — how it operates in families, in couples, in institutions, in political systems. Every relationship in his films is a power relationship. Every gesture of love is also a gesture of control. Every act of submission contains the seed of rebellion. The fish-eye lens that has become his visual signature is not merely a stylistic choice — it is a philosophical one. It distorts the center of the frame while curving the periphery, creating a visual field in which nothing is straight, nothing is stable, and the world itself seems to be warping under the pressure of the forces that govern it.

---

The Architecture of Absurdism

World-Building Through Rules

Every Lanthimos film establishes a set of rules that govern its fictional world, and these rules are simultaneously arbitrary and internally consistent. In The Lobster, the Hotel has specific regulations: residents must attend dances, participate in demonstrations of the advantages of coupledom over singleness, and hunt "loners" in the forest with tranquilizer darts. In Dogtooth, the family compound operates according to the Father's invented language and fabricated dangers. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the supernatural logic of ritual sacrifice — an eye for an eye, a life for a life — operates with mathematical precision.

The rules are never explained or justified. They simply exist, and the characters navigate them with the same mixture of compliance and anxiety that we bring to the unwritten rules of our own social worlds. Lanthimos never provides an origin story for his rules. He never shows us how the Hotel came to exist or who built the Dogtooth compound. The absence of explanation is essential: it forces the audience to experience the rules as the characters do — as conditions of existence rather than plot devices.

Literalization of Metaphor

Lanthimos's most powerful technique is the literalization of metaphor. When we say that loneliness is "dehumanizing," we speak figuratively. In The Lobster, it is literal: fail to find a partner and you become an animal. When we say that grief can "cripple" a family, we speak metaphorically. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, it is literal: Steven's children progressively lose the ability to walk, eat, and ultimately live. When we say that a sheltered upbringing leaves children "unprepared for the world," we speak loosely. In Dogtooth, the children literally do not know what the world is — they have never seen it.

This literalization operates as a defamiliarization device. By making metaphors concrete, Lanthimos strips away the comfortable distance that figurative language provides. We can discuss the "dehumanizing" effect of loneliness in abstract terms and feel nothing. But when we watch a woman calmly explain that she chose to become a pony, we feel the full weight of what loneliness does. The absurdity does not diminish the horror — it intensifies it by removing the cushion of abstraction.

The Deadpan as Weapon

The tonal register of a Lanthimos film is absolutely flat. Dialogue is delivered without inflection, without emotional coloring, without the rise and fall of natural speech. Characters announce their feelings rather than express them: "I am sad now." "I am attracted to you." "I want to hurt you." This flatness is not a failure of direction — it is the directorial choice. By stripping affect from speech, Lanthimos makes visible the gap between what people feel and what social convention allows them to express. The deadpan delivery also creates a pervasive sense of unease: if the characters cannot be relied upon to signal their emotions through conventional means, the audience loses its ability to predict what will happen next. Anything is possible in a world where a character can describe an act of extreme violence in the same tone they use to order dinner.

---

Visual Distortion: The Fish-Eye and the Wide Angle

Robbie Ryan's Lens Choices

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan's work with Lanthimos, beginning with The Killing of a Sacred Deer and continuing through The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, has defined the visual language of late Lanthimos. The use of extremely wide-angle and fish-eye lenses distorts the image in ways that are both beautiful and unsettling. Ceilings curve. Walls bend. Human faces at the edges of the frame stretch into grotesque proportions. The center of the image seems to recede while the periphery swells, creating a visual experience of instability, of a world that cannot hold its shape.

In The Favourite, these lenses transform the English court into a funhouse — the grand rooms of Hatfield House become warped caverns in which the power games between Abigail, Sarah, and Queen Anne play out in a space that is literally distorted by ambition and desire. The architectural grandeur that should signify power and stability instead signifies derangement and excess. The lenses do not comment on the action — they are the action, making visible the forces that warp human relationships into their twisted shapes.

Natural Light and Candlelight

Alongside the wide-angle distortion, Lanthimos and Ryan favor natural light sources, particularly in period settings. The Favourite was famously lit primarily by candlelight and natural window light, creating a visual environment of deep shadow and warm, flickering illumination. This lighting choice serves the fish-eye aesthetic by increasing the contrast between illuminated centers and dark peripheries, and it creates an atmosphere of intimacy that is simultaneously warm and claustrophobic. In Poor Things, the lighting shifts between the hyperreal brightness of Bella's expanding world and the shadowed interiors of Godwin Baxter's laboratory, mapping her journey from confinement to freedom through the quality of light.

The Overhead Shot

Lanthimos frequently employs extreme high-angle and overhead shots that reduce human figures to insects crawling across patterned surfaces. In The Favourite, overhead shots of the court looking down on checkerboard floors transform human beings into game pieces. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, overhead hospital corridor shots reduce surgeons and patients to figures in a maze. These shots establish the perspective of a detached, possibly malevolent observer — a God's-eye view that is simultaneously omniscient and indifferent. The humans in Lanthimos's films are always being watched from above, and the watcher does not care.

---

The Body as Territory: Physical Performance

Movement and Gesture

Lanthimos directs physical performance with the precision of choreography. In Dogtooth, the children move with an awkward, uncoordinated physicality that reflects their stunted development — they run like people who have never been taught how to run, they dance like people who have learned dancing from a single VHS tape. In The Lobster, the residents of the Hotel hold their bodies with a rigid formality that expresses the institution's suppression of natural impulse. In Poor Things, Bella Baxter's physical evolution — from lurching, uncoordinated movements to confident, sensual grace — charts her entire psychological development without a word of dialogue.

The body in Lanthimos is never neutral. Every posture, every gesture, every way of sitting or standing or walking communicates the power dynamics of the scene. Characters who are dominated tend to hold themselves in contracted, defensive positions. Characters who dominate tend to sprawl, to take up space, to touch others without permission. When these positions shift — when the submissive character suddenly strikes or the dominant character suddenly crumbles — the physical reversal carries more dramatic weight than any dialogue.

Violence as Punctuation

Violence in Lanthimos arrives with the same flatness as everything else. It is not dramatized, not choreographed for excitement, not accompanied by swelling music. A character cuts themselves with a knife. A character is shot with a tranquilizer dart. A character beats another character with a VHS tape. These acts of violence are presented with the same matter-of-fact directness as eating a meal or crossing a room. This treatment strips violence of its cinematic glamor and reveals it as what it is: an assertion of power, a last resort of the inarticulate, a physical fact that refuses to be aestheticized.

The exception is the violence in Poor Things, which takes on a more picaresque, almost cartoonish quality that reflects Bella's childlike perception. This demonstrates Lanthimos's range — the treatment of violence shifts according to the subjective reality of the film's world, but it is always deliberate, always precisely calibrated.

---

Language as Control System

Invented and Distorted Language

Language in Lanthimos is never natural. It is always a system of control, a technology of power, a cage built from words. In Dogtooth, the parents systematically redefine words: "sea" means "armchair," "excursion" means "floor material," "zombie" means "a small yellow flower." By controlling language, they control reality itself — the children cannot desire the sea if "sea" does not mean what we think it means. This is Orwellian thought control pushed to its absurdist extreme, and it is Lanthimos's most explicit statement about the relationship between language and power.

Even in films without invented vocabularies, Lanthimos's dialogue has a distinctive quality: characters speak in declarative statements, avoid contractions, use formal register in intimate situations, and describe their emotions clinically rather than expressing them spontaneously. This linguistic estrangement — the sense that everyone is speaking a language that is almost but not quite natural — creates a persistent unease that never resolves into familiarity.

Script Structure and Repetition

Lanthimos's scripts, often co-written with Efthimis Filippou, employ repetition as a structural principle. Characters repeat phrases, actions, and rituals with minor variations, creating patterns that are simultaneously comic and disturbing. In The Lobster, the hotel's daily routines — the dances, the propaganda presentations, the hunting expeditions — recur with slight differences that mark the passage of time and the accumulation of desperation. Repetition in Lanthimos functions like a trap: the characters are caught in loops they cannot escape, performing the same actions with diminishing hope.

---

Genre as Disguise: Comedy, Horror, and Period Drama

The Indeterminate Genre

Lanthimos's films refuse generic classification. The Lobster is simultaneously a dystopian science fiction film, a black comedy, and a devastating romance. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is simultaneously a domestic drama, a supernatural thriller, and a Greek tragedy. The Favourite is simultaneously a period drama, a political satire, and a psychological horror film. Poor Things is simultaneously a feminist coming-of-age story, a gothic science fiction tale, and a sexual picaresque.

This generic indeterminacy is not confusion but strategy. By refusing to commit to a single genre, Lanthimos prevents the audience from settling into the expectations and emotional postures that genre provides. You cannot watch The Killing of a Sacred Deer as a horror film because it keeps veering into domestic comedy. You cannot watch it as domestic comedy because a child suddenly loses the ability to walk. The audience is perpetually off-balance, unable to anticipate what comes next, and this instability mirrors the instability of the characters' worlds.

Greek Tragedy Beneath the Surface

Despite the contemporary settings and absurdist surfaces, Lanthimos's narratives frequently follow the deep structures of Greek tragedy. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is explicitly modeled on Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis: a father must sacrifice a child to atone for a past transgression. The Lobster follows the structure of tragic inevitability: the protagonist's attempts to escape the system only drive him deeper into its logic. The Favourite maps the rise and fall of court favorites with the mechanical precision of a fate-driven tragedy. Lanthimos brings the ancient Greek understanding that human beings are subject to forces beyond their control into collision with the modern delusion that we are the masters of our own destinies.

---

Writing/Directing Specifications

1. Establish a set of arbitrary but internally consistent rules that govern the world of the film. These rules should literalize a metaphor about human behavior — the dehumanization of loneliness, the crippling effect of guilt, the prison of language. The rules must be presented without explanation or justification. Characters obey them as facts of life, not as impositions to be questioned.

2. Direct all dialogue delivery toward absolute flatness. Characters should speak without inflection, without emotional coloring, without the rhythmic variety of natural speech. They should announce their emotions rather than express them. When a character says something horrifying, they should say it in the same tone as something banal. The gap between content and delivery is where the Lanthimos effect lives.

3. Use wide-angle and fish-eye lenses to distort interior spaces. Ceilings should curve, walls should bend, faces at the edges of the frame should stretch. The visual distortion should make familiar spaces — homes, hospitals, hotels — feel unstable and threatening. The center of the frame should recede while the periphery swells, creating a sense that the world is warping under pressure.

4. Choreograph physical movement with the precision of a dance piece. Every posture, gesture, and way of moving through space should communicate power dynamics. Characters who are controlled should move with constraint; characters who control should move with expansiveness. When these physical positions reverse, the reversal should be as dramatic as any plot twist.

5. Present violence with the same tonal flatness as all other actions. Do not dramatize or aestheticize violence. A character being hit should receive the same directorial treatment as a character eating breakfast. The camera should not flinch, the score should not swell, the editing should not accelerate. Violence is a fact, not a spectacle.

6. Build repetitive structures into the narrative. Characters should perform the same rituals, recite the same phrases, and follow the same routines with minor variations. Repetition should accumulate meaning and dread. The audience should feel the characters trapped in cycles they cannot break, performing the same actions with decreasing hope and increasing desperation.

7. Refuse to commit to a single genre. The film should be simultaneously funny and disturbing, absurd and tragic, satirical and sincere. The audience should never be able to settle into the emotional posture that a recognized genre provides. If a scene begins as comedy, it should end as horror. If it begins as romance, it should end as violence. Generic instability is the goal.

8. Use overhead shots to establish a detached, possibly malevolent observational perspective. At least several key moments should be filmed from directly above, reducing human figures to patterns on a surface. This perspective should suggest that the characters are being watched by a consciousness that sees everything and feels nothing — a cosmic indifference to human suffering.

9. Control language as a power system. Characters should speak in formal, declarative sentences. Avoid contractions and naturalistic speech patterns. If the world permits it, introduce distortions of language — redefined words, required phrases, forbidden expressions. Language in Lanthimos is never a transparent medium of communication; it is always a technology of control.

10. End the film at the moment of maximum ambiguity. The final scene should present an action that could mean two opposite things — an act of love that might be an act of violence, a liberation that might be a new imprisonment, a sacrifice that might be a betrayal. Do not resolve the ambiguity. Cut to black while the audience is still deciding what they have just witnessed.